Hide and go seek is isolating, teaches harmful anti-social habits, and often results in children remaining clandestinely in trees for years waiting to be found. Look at me! is a fun indoor game that is just the opposite. One person closes his eyes and counts slowly to ten. Meanwhile, the other children huddle around him as conspicuously as they can. Whoever he sees first when he opens his eyes, wins!

2. Slip n’ Slide

Take a piece of tarp at least 25 feet long and stretch it out on your floor. Don’t have a 25 foot stretch of floor in your house? Knock down a few walls! Fill buckets of water from your bathtub and dump them out on the tarp til it’s good n’ wet. Turn on the furnace and set the thermostat to 95 degrees. Wait three days or so for the house to heat up. Boy, now you’re ready now for a little coolin’ off, right? The last two steps are just what you need. Step 1-slip, Step 2-slide!

3. Meatloaf

Mix one pound of ground beef and one pound of ground pork together in a large mixing bowl. Coarsely chop one large onion and combine with the meat. Add 2 teaspoons black pepper, one teaspoon salt, and a quarter cup of Worcestershire sauce. Add one cup of bread crumbs and 2 large eggs to bind, and mix thoroughly. Bake at 350 degrees in a greased 5×11 loaf pan for 40 minutes. Mmmm-What’s that smell?!

4. Chocolate fountain

Nothing’s more elegant than a chocolate fountain, but they’re so expensive! Betcha didn’t know you have everything you need to make your own right in your house. Just drain the water from your hot water heater and fill it up with all the kid’s leftover halloween candy (make sure you take off the wrappers first!). Then just turn on the tap and get ready for a sweet surprise! (Great dipping ideas: bananas, pretzels, breadsticks, and, of course, milk!)

5. Hide and Go Seek

What better way to get to know all the secret places in your house? Under the couch. In the bathroom vanity. Atop the ceiling fan. Amidst the foliage of the burr oak in your two story indoor terrarium. ‘It’ doesn’t stand a chance!

Welcome to the first post of my new blog; The Sheltered Life! With all the shows, blogs, articles, apps, and social medias focusing on the outdoors, (ov-er-rat-ed, am I right!), it’s way past time for a blog that gives the real story: the story of the IN-doors, the best of the -doors, as all of us in the IN-crowd already know!

I’m so excited to bring you posts about how to explore the fascinating world inside your own home.

Wooster and Jeeves, the world’s cutest pair of puggles, will be helping me come up with lots of great ways to make your house a pet-paradise, and I’ll even be heading right out of my comfort zone with some fun kid-friendly activities and some romantic hubby-friendly activities. Its the inside scoop!

But in this first post I wanted to answer some frequently asked questions right off the bat. Really, these questions aren’t frequently asked yet, since this is my very first post. So really these are only frequently askable questions. But since I’m answering them here, right out in the open, hopefully soon they’ll be never asked questions!

Q: Why is the url for this blog outofalldoors.wordpress.com?

A: For my first A, let me tell a story. I tried to get theshelteredlife.wordpress.com, but it turns out it’s already taken by the blog of a humane society chapter that hires homeschooled children to euthanize their un-adpoted animals. So I picked ‘out of all doors’ in honor of the dream that inspired me to start this blog.

Q: What was the dream, Maya?

A: I was lying on the floor of a house just like mine—only much larger, and with lots of doors on every wall. Dozens of doors. Scores of doors! But then, as I was trying to take in all the doors, they began to slowly disappear—one by one. 100 doors became 75, 75 became 62, 62 became 12, until there was just one door left, right in front of me, across the long, empty room. As I looked at the door I realized that it would soon vanish, too, and that I would never be able to leave the house again. (Oh, there were also no windows in the dream house—I should have mentioned that earlier) And then-poof!-it was gone. I was out of all doors. But instead of panic, a deep calm fell over me, and soon, the calm gave way to something magical, a joy that I couldn’t express. Why? Because I realized that I didn’t need any doors. I didn’t even want any. Indoors—where I already was—was the only place I wanted to be. Then I woke up. And I knew what the dream meant. I said to myself (outloud!) ‘I. Need. To blog.’ And the rest, as they say, is history!

Q: I’m so sick of all the ECO-maniacs on all those outdoor blogs and podcasts. Is this blog just going to be full of out-there radical politics, too?

A: Oh man, Q, I hear ya! But don’t worry, I’m no radical. It’s true, I love the indoors, but unlike those other blogs I’m not all negative about the other side. I don’t hate the outdoors—heck, my house, which is where is love to be, is itself almost entirely outdoors! So think of me as a moderate voice, bringing a little reason and perspective to this mad, mad e-world.